Michel Béroff was born in France in 1950. After graduating from the Paris conservatoire in 1966, he won in the following year the first prize at the first international Olivier Messiaen piano competition. He has been considered as one of the most outstanding interpreter of Messiaen’s music. He then went on to play with the most prestigious orchestras around the world under the direction of such conductors as Abbado, Barenboim, Bernstein, Boulez, Dohnanyi, Dorati, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Gielen, Inbal, Jochum, Leinsdorf, Masur, Ozawa, Previn, Rostropovitch, Sinopoli, Solti, Tennsted, Tilson-Thomas, Zinman. As a chamber music partner , he has been very active playing with Martha Argerich , Barbara Hendricks Jean- Philippe Collard, Augustin Dumay, Pierre Amoyal, Lynn Harrell. He has maintained long-term cooperative relations with the world’s top symphony orchestra and many famous conductors, and has traveled all over the world.
As a conductor, Michel Beroff has been conducting the chamber orchestra de la Scala de Milano, the Russian state Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre National de Lille, the Cannes chamber orchestra, the Berkeley symphony, the Montréal youth orchestra.
He has published more than 50 recordings and has been awarded five times in France. Being a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, where he taught for 25 years, Michel Béroff is giving regular master classes in many countries, including Japan, China, USA, Italy and France.
Beroff insisted on the principle of not playing in public anything from before 1900 except Mozart sonatas. He played mainly modern works by Bartok, Mesian, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Beroff has a strong grasp of rhythm. He can show a rich color on the piano and is the most powerful interpretation of Messien’s works
In recent seasons, Michel Beroff has toured extensively with Pierre Boulez, Kurt Masur’s New York Philharmonic and the philharmonic. He has performed three special concerts in Japan, including one with the philharmonic under the direction of Essa-pekka Salonen. In addition, he performed the complete piano works of Debussy and Janacek in Paris, and gave two concerts of Prokofiev’s works with Eisenbach and the Paris orchestra. He has also toured extensively in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Greece, Brazil, Korea and China.
Several times in recent years, he invited a famous international piano competition jury, which includes: Tchaikovsky international music competition, Van Cliburn international piano competition, Leeds international piano competition, the Swiss La Hasjier piano competition, Rubinstein international piano competitions, Margaret long international piano competition in Paris, France. Many of his students have also won top prizes in international piano competitions, including south Korean student Cho Sung-jin, who won the 2016 Chopin international piano competition.